Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1359: Errors Come in Threes

Episode Date: April 6, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a Blue Jays fan who’s unfazed by foul balls, a possible comeback for defunct Fox show Pitch, the Mariners (specifically Tim Beckham and Dylan Moore) committing errors in bunches, the offensive futility of Chris Davis, how Nationals fans treated Bryce Harper in his return to DC, Ramon Laureano’s […]

And the summer scars run around me And the summer grows around my neck And the summer still remains a memory Till the summer turns the day to black No pressure, but Sam did the intro yesterday. Oh no. You didn't forget what I had promised. I forgot what I just now remembered. 1359? Should we give it a shot?

Sure, you had a whole week to practice and just choked I did very little preparation Hello and welcome to What do we even say when we do this? You get the episode number in there, the website you work for, and the Patreon people. Oh, okay, yeah, we do like those Patreon people. They are sure our pals. Okay, hello and welcome to episode 1359 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs podcast.

Yeah, that's what it is, brought to you by our lovely Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and joining me as always at least for me is ben limberg of the ringer ben how are you hi i'm doing well that was pretty good yeah i i would if we were gonna put it on like the 2080 scale i think it's it's like maybe like a 50 it has a lot of room for improvement yeah but is it serviceable you know it? It's playable sometimes. Yeah. We can definitely continue the podcast, I think. So that's good. You're not going to excise me from your co-hosting association? No. So what are we doing today? I don't know. We're just bantering. I'm at a wedding,

so I don't know what's going on in baseball, but not too much apparently. And there are a few things that we've wanted to talk about over the last week. at Blue Jays games. I have noticed her for quite a while because she has a number of very lovely scarves, which she alternates throughout the course of the season. But she got some recognition from the rest of the online baseball community when she just did not flinch at a ball that was fouled straight back in her general direction. Yeah, she went viral.

Yeah. You, I think, were the first person I found out about her from you, because I think you talked about her on a Fangraphs Audio episode with Sam, maybe. I don't know if you had appreciated her ability not to flinch. I know you liked just her kind of stately presence and her scarves. And she's always there, I guess. And I read a little bit about her. Evidently, she doesn't want to be interviewed, or at least she wants to be anonymous. She doesn't want the fame. She just wants to go to baseball games and wear really nice scarves and not react at all when foul balls come right at her head. I wondered, so I surveyed a couple of scouting types I know about this, but I'm curious. couple of scouting types I know about this, but I'm curious. So you went to scout school and you, I assume, sat behind home plate a fair amount in the course of doing that. What was your foul ball to flinch ratio, if you had to guess? I'm trying to remember. Yeah, that was, I mean, those were like games in Arizona. I don't think

there was netting, but we were also walking around all the time because that was like part of the scout school thing was, okay, watch this guy from this angle and then go watch him from the first base side and go watch him from the third base side. So I don't know that I actually had that much time in like the scout seats or what you typically think of as the scout seats, but I'm sure that if I did, I would not be as unfazed, totally unfazed. that if I did, I would not be as unfazed, totally unfazed. It clearly isn't that she is just like visually impaired or something and just couldn't see the ball coming at her because then in a separate clip, I saw she like mocked people for overreacting or at least she, maybe it was a self-mocking thing. I don't know, but she kind of pantomimed an overreaction to a foul ball. That was in stark contrast to her non-reaction. So it's pretty impressive. I guess if she has season tickets and she's always there, then she's probably seen so many foul balls come right at her that at this point she's deconditioned. Right. When Fangraphs went to Arizona this last little

bit to do our annual trip, I went to, on sort of the final day that most of the staff was there, went to an Arizona State game with Kylie and Eric and David Appelman and our whole merry band or part of it. And one of the ASU hitters fouled a ball back, and I flinched because I'm not you know, not a scout. And Kylie made fun of me a little tiny bit, although he, he guessed that it would take, it would take about a year maybe of like regular exposure so that your brain does not have to go through the mental

process of saying, oh, there's a net here and I'm not going to get hit by this. Although, uh, I posed the same question to Eric when we were sort of figuring out what we were going to chat about today. He said that he didn't know that it would take quite that long. He was unable to remember when it is exactly that he stopped flinching behind home plate. Although he did point out, and I have seen this, it's very rare that it happened, but the ball does get through every now and again. So it is a strange impulse and instinct to overcome to not try to get out of the way of this projectile moving

very very fast at your face that's a normal thing to try to get out of the way of survival instinct i hope this doesn't like carry over to other aspects of her life now where like oncoming traffic she's just like staring at it not moving because uh yeah you want that instinct in other contexts so but she's been there for years i mean you've been appreciating her scarves for quite some time now i don't know how long the netting has been there but do you have any estimate of how long she has been there at least to your knowledge i um i i remember noticing her i think in 20 maybe 2016 i'm not going to go through the rigmarole of searching my twitter because i know that i have not tweeted about her nearly as much as i have tweeted about mary hart who is also back at dodger stadium so baseball is officially

started because uh all all of my all of the members of my presidential administration are well represented in the baseball community. But I think I remember her maybe in 2015 or perhaps in 2016, because I think I first noticed her during a playoff series. So yeah, it had to have been one of those two years because we haven't gotten another one since and we didn't have one long before. But I got the sense when I Googled around that she's been there for quite a while. I think that those tickets have been hers for quite some time. So she's just a very dedicated Blue Jays fan. Have you noticed the crowd sizes on Blue Jays broadcasts no it's not good

it does not it does not appear to be good uh i make sense yeah i i hope that they i hope that vlad is up uh for a variety of reasons very very soon but i will admit that i thought of that woman and her scars when he got hurt i was like but but the scarf lady, she's been waiting so long. She just wants Vladito. Bring him to her. Does she alternate scarves? Does she bring back favorites? Do you notice the same ones showing up again and again?

I have seen a couple of different ones sort of repeat. But no, I thought about doing a study of it. Typical Meg fashion, but I also sort of stumbled upon the same thing you did, which is that she doesn't seem particularly keen to have her presence acknowledged to the extent of, say, Marlon's man or the gal who's always near home plate. I don't know if anyone is as keen to have their presence acknowledged as Marlon's man. Yeah, or like the woman who sits near home plate at Brewers Games. So, you know, I figured that since she has a publicly expressed presence for, you know, non-fame, that I would not be a creep and catalog her presence there any more than I have on podcasts. I bet she does. I wonder if she listens to our show. If you do,

we apologize, but you just fascinate us. You're so delightful. Yeah. And now everyone knows about her. So that's nice. Yeah. So another thing that was right in our wheelhouse this week, there was a report that pitch may be coming back, which is exciting. And I had given up on this possibly happening. I mean, we did a farewell episode interview of Pitch and we all kind of said goodbye to it as much as we could. I think we were resigned to it ending and to Ginny never coming back from her Tommy John surgery and never continuing her career. And then there was a report in The Hollywood Reporter that suggested that it could be on the way back. And I actually reached out to someone who is involved in Pitch's production, very well connected in the Pitch production community. And I was told that there is some fire there behind that smoke. And that

evidently as recently as a few months ago, it seemed impossible out of the question. And now it is not at all. It is conceivable that Pitchcock could be coming back. So this is exciting. I had said goodbye. We had kind of made our peace with it, I think. And now after we had given up hope, here it comes, possibly. Possibly. I guess the real question is is mark paul gossler going to abandon his um other fox production yeah the passage did the passage and the pitch universe exist in the same are they part of the same larger cinematic universe i don't think so i think the passage takes place in the future or there's a time jump so that would probably be inconvenient yeah so i i did see yeah he tweeted like he's not sure whether to shave or not now because of this

report so he's evidently not any more plugged in than we are but this is exciting the real life padres are exciting now and maybe the fictional padres will be coming back and yeah i i don't know where they will take this thing, but I'm overjoyed that they might get a second crack at it. Yeah, I think that it would, I will be very curious to see if it does come back, how they incorporate the sort of current goings on of the team with the pitch universe, because that was always one of the things, and you know, we remarked on this at the time, it was certainly close enough to, you know, what real baseball is like that I think even folks like us who are very into the minutiae were able to let some stuff go. But like there was a strangeness to the pitch universe. Like it was a universe where active baseball players existed, but a trade deadline episode focused on the Angels needing to trade for a center fielder. And it's like, does Mike Trout not exist, but Salvador Perez does?

That's a strange universe. Trout did exist in the pitch universe, right? Yeah, I think so, right. Yeah, a character who mentioned him. Right. Yeah, and I remember at the time the Mariners still had Nelson Cruz, and I think part of that same trade deadline episode was the Mariners needing to acquire a DH and he was the best DH in the league that year so it was just it'll be it'll be very interesting to see how they would navigate the current situation with

the Padres because uh you know I I think that a Manny Machado Ginny subplot could be very fun I could be into that or you know let's hear what Tatis has to say about Ginny's Tommy John and, you know, playing defense behind her. But I don't know. I don't know how they will manage that. Maybe it will just exist out of time. But then where does Manny Machado play in the pitch universe if he doesn't play for the Padres? See, these are things we're going to have to think about. Right.

Yeah. Well, I'm hopeful that we will have to think about them because I didn't think we would. So I kind of hope that the romance plot subplot maybe just doesn't make the jump to the second season. I don't know. It probably will because they kind of open that box and I don't know that you can put it back in again. But I kind of liked the platonic friendship there. But we'll see. Yes.

It was nice to see. It was nice to see coworkers have genuine affection for one another without that. Although, you know, I will forgive Ginny for being, you know, intrigued by Zack Morris, even though Zack Morris probably does not exist in Ginny's universe. But yes, I would imagine that a significant time jump will be involved should this come back. And so maybe we'll learn that they tried it out and decided it didn't work, or they decided to wait until he was actually traded,

because as we recall, that was what opened the door that he might end up on whatever playoff-bound team he was likely to end up on now i don't remember but to be curious that part was that they did seem like they had kind of boxed themselves into a corner yeah well if they're building up a writer's room again i'm just saying we're we're out here didn't uh didn't molly knight she was involved i think so yeah i think she in some way yeah i think she at the very least consulted i don't know um the extent of her involvement beyond that but they had you know they had quite a murderer's row although i i remember seeing that their writer's

room did not perhaps did not have as many women in it as you might like especially for a show with a female protagonist so uh yeah they can they can reconstitute and i'll be curious to see what that does to the the romance subplot might have the effect of neutralizing it although i suppose we don't we won't know until we know right all right well that's encouraging i uh i'm reading a thread in our facebook group right now about what is happening with tim beckham poor tim beckham on friday evidently he committed three errors on the first three batters in the game about what is happening with Tim Beckham, poor Tim Beckham, on Friday. Evidently, he committed three errors on the first three batters in the game, something like that. And this is following the three-error inning that poor Dylan Moore had

for the Mariners the other day. Is defense maybe not this Mariners team's strong suit? You know, it is not. And I think that we all, you we're we're smart sabermetric types and we know the error as a stat is limited and that there might be more um descriptive statistics that we could employ to describe uh the state of a defense but sometimes you watch a team and they commit a bunch of errors and you're like yeah this is a this is a bad defensive baseball team this is not there's not a lot of scoring

judgment going on here this is not the score being particularly stingy toward a batter and no like that it's pretty bad i mean here here is i have the play-by-play of the mariners first inning against the white socks up at the moment which started with a fielding error by Beckham. Then Tim Anderson singled on a ball, ground ball to center field. And then Jose Abreu came up. He reached on a fielder's choice, fielded by Tim Beckham. Garcia scored. Tim Anderson went to second, throwing error by shortstop Tim Beckham, fielding error by shortstop Tim Beckham.

I'm afraid to play video lest it makes sound on the pod, but I think I might risk it just because I was editing a thing and did not see these real time. I'm going to mute this. We don't need to hear a Snapple commercial nor a commercial for the terrifying

insurance consulting firm that is everywhere on MLB TV these days. We can have a quick digression when this is done on the state of MLB TV commercials, because boy, golly, I am sick of them already. It does not take long for the three ads that you see to get into your brain and never leave. So he tries to field a ball on a hop and kind of just drops it. So that's error the first and then uh and then he did it again and then uh and then he threw the ball away trying to throw

out a first okay oh poor tim beckham i still think the dylan moore's was worse yeah have you seen did you watch the dylan moore inning i didn't want to watch the Dylan Moore inning. So no, because the thing about the Dylan Moore game was that he had an almost equally bad night at the plate, right? Yes. I forget which game. That was the 0 for 4 with three strikeouts and a grounded as a double play or something, which is... I believe so. They were playing. That was during the Red Sox series. Can I go back quickly enough? March 30th, I'm there. Yeah.

So 0 for 4, three strikeouts. Granted, it's a double play and three errors in one inning. Yeah. WPA-wise, that's got to be up there. I'm trying to think that it's not so terrible just for the offensive side, but if you factored in the defensive side too yeah that's a rough game yeah he was worth worth what a way to describe him yeah he he definitely had the worst night by wpa in that game that's not true xander bogarts had a worse night how is that possible that seems well and then of course right they attribute the the defense to the pitchers right

so that's yeah okay that's how that works that's right yes the the part of it that was the the worst for me is that it was really the exact same error three times in a row like he got the same opportunity to get them out of the inning three times with the ball going to him in the exact same place. And then it was just one, two, three, unable to do what he needed to. And I have always wondered, I've written about this within the context of Sandy Leon, because he had the terrible stretch last year where he just was not hitting for like a month. He just did not have a hit for a month. And I have often wondered how long it would take a baseball player who has like made the majors and perhaps had a professional career. Although, you know, Dylan Morris isn't,

you know, so long or, um, Sterling that, uh, you know, he would feel confident that he wouldn't just get sent down, but how long it would take a professional hitter who really knows what they're doing or fielder to become convinced that they had just lost a baseball skill, that it had fully just disappeared from their purview, were no longer able to do a baseball thing. And it doesn't have to be throwing, right? It doesn't necessarily have to be a yip steal, but I've always wondered like what part of, what percentage of your understanding of your skillset at any given moment would start to shift toward the oh, I just can't do this anymore. I like woke up and it's gone. and he was in one of his first major league games. They did, fortunately, hold on to win that game because it was a one-run game at the end,

and so he put the game in jeopardy too, which would have been even worse. Fortunately, they held on, so you can kind of forget about it. And he did play a game since and did not make an error, I don't think. I don't think he did, no. He got back out there, and, you know, Scott Service did the thing that a manager should do after where he's like, it's okay, young man. But yes, it ended up where the Mariners were staring down a one run game with runners on and JD Martinez at the plate and Nick Rumbelow on the mound because the Mariners bullpen is as bad as you think it is. And these were their options. Mariners' bullpen is as bad as you think it is, and these were their options.

So, yeah, it could very well have been, you know, an evening that cost them a win, but thankfully it did not. Yeah. Because I can't imagine how that would feel. Yeah. Chris Davis, yeah, I think he's, what, 0 for his last 38, I believe, going back to last season? Yes. And I think 25 strikeouts in there. So he is eight at-bats away, eight non-on-base events. Well, he did get on base, as Sam and I discussed on yesterday's episode. He was intentionally walked in the middle of this, weirdly.

But, yeah, he's 0 for his last 38, and the record is 0 for 46, which I think was Eugenio Vélez in 2011, something like that, fairly recently. So, yeah, he's getting up there. It does not appear that he has improved over the winter. In our Orioles preview segment, we talked about how the Orioles were trying to get him into analytics and maybe he was trying to revamp some things and based on the early results results doesn't seem to have worked. And it's getting to that like difficult to watch level and difficult to talk about.

I don't even know if we should focus more attention on it. But it's at that level where you kind of just wonder if he has completely lost it and what you do when that happens. Yeah. His as you know we are all aware spadding average is zero sound base is 190 slugging percentage is zero he's a negative 49 wrc plus yeah he has a 52.4 strikeout rate yeah i just we got a little bit of this last year with Cole Calhoun. Because remember, Cole Calhoun had that miserable, miserable start. And then he was better for a little while.

He was incredible for a while. He went from like as cold as you can be to as hot as you can be to then kind of cold again at the end, but in a normal way. So, yeah, you can bounce back from it. As he showed, his mechanics were all screwed up because he tried to change a swing and it didn't go well but chris davis we're talking about more than a season now so right right i mean when when calhoun and like it still wasn't it still didn't approach this level of futility right like when cole calhoun was really having a hard time, he was not a productive major leaguer by any means. Like he had a 13 WRC plus in March and April last year. He had a negative WRC plus in May. But then you're right. He rebounded like he was a 103 WRC plus player in June and 202 in July and like 119 in August. So he was hot during the middle part of the season and then he tapered off. But like, you know, no one remembered because the Angels weren't really in a playoff hunt at that point. So it wasn't like his performance affected their ability to make the postseason. But yeah,

it's just even he was more productive in the midst of this than Chris Davis is right now. And I felt bad talking about this. I remember talking to Jeff about it. I was like, we shouldn't write articles about this, right? It's too bad. Yeah. Like his mom might see. Yeah. And it's a similar situation where there isn't really a reason to stop playing him, like a pressing reason.

Right. Other than just to give him a break, basically, because it's the Orioles and he's not like blocking some other really good player. And if he ends up at negative something war again, it's not going to cost the Orioles a playoff spot. So it's just like, at what point does it get to a degree where he just doesn't want to go on and no one wants it to go on and you have to at least give him some kind of mental breather or mechanical rework or I don't know what you do. Something. But, yeah, it is really bad, really bad.

I'm going to provide a from the past Mariners update, which everyone will be very thrilled to hear about. The Mariners are somehow now ahead in this White Sox game as we record this on Friday. They have hit one. They have hit two, three, four home runs. The mighty Mariners offense. Yeah. Domingo Santana dingered again. Sure. Daniel Vogelbeck hit a home run. Brian Healy did too. Mitch Hanegar did. That makes more sense. Yeah. Well, that actually is a segue too to something that I wanted to bring up which is the dingers and also the strikeouts which is uh not entirely Chris Davis related although he's doing his part but yeah I

mean we're only a week into the season here but it's not too soon to start making some kind of conclusions about offense and the run environment in baseball right now. And so I believe Eno and Joshian have already written about the strikeout rate, which seems to be taking another tick up. And I wrote about it in spring training as we discussed, and it was not dramatically up in spring training, which was almost encouraging, but it was up somewhat. And so you could tell that nothing had forced it back down in the other direction. I don't know what would, but you couldn't see any evidence that that had happened. But so far in the early going this year, we're up to 36% three true outcomes. So that's like last year

was 33.8%, which was an all-time record. and it has been an all-time record just every year for the past few, and that is, of course, walks plus strikeouts plus home runs, so now we're up to 36% of all plate appearances going to that, plus you're also at an all-time level for hit-by-pitches, so that takes you almost up to 40%. I mean, it's like 37 point something, I think, for just non-contact events or non-contact with the bat at least. And I don't know that this is where it would end. That would be a huge jump if it stays there. So maybe this will change. It's April, but April you would think that if anything, there would be fewer dingers and we're seeing lots of dingers. And as Rob Arthur wrote at Baseball Perspectives on Friday, it seems like the ball is flying again. Not that it wasn't flying last year, but it's flying more like it was in 2017. So it does not appear to be a mirage that there are lots of dingers this year. Yeah, I also wonder, it's one of those things where it feels impossible that this much year-to-year variation is just a result of manufacturing variation, like some unorchestrated, not to indulge in conspiracy theories, but to temporarily indulge in conspiracy theories. It seems strange that we would have that much year-to-year fluctuation in manufacturing in such a short period of time where we'd had largely consistent or at least more reasonable upticks in home runs over prior years, right?

So I am surprised that if that were a thing that were being done purposefully, if it were, which we aren't saying it is, but if we were saying it was, that they wouldn't be better at it by now. environment with a bit more precision than what we're seeing here because it's just such a noticeable jump every time this happens that if there is some sort of conspiracy to try to tinker with the ball, they aren't very good at sneaking. They aren't smooth sneakers. Yeah. Well, it's hard to sneak now because we have this data that allows us to see with really good precision. So Rob uses the StatCast data. He doesn't have to like fire the baseballs at a cylinder or something and see how fast they rebound. It's like you can just take the difference in how fast the ball is when it leaves the pitcher's hand and how fast it is when it gets to the plate. And that gives you the drag coefficient of the baseball. It doesn't tell you necessarily why the drag is changing. And I think that's still something of a mystery. But if there is less of a reduction in speed on its way to the plate, then you know that there's less drag on the ball, which then leads to more carry when the ball is hit in the air. And so he found that early in the season this year, it isn't like historically high, but it's about as high as it was in 2017 and higher than it was most of the time, almost all of the time last year.

So it does seem to have picked back up again. And as he said, it could just be manufacturing variation. It could be like the quality of the leather or something that's used in a particular shipment of balls because it does bounce around a bit throughout the season but yeah i mean if they did want to affect it if they wanted to bring it back down i'm sure they could fairly easily now now that we know not only what has happened previous times that they've changed the ball but we have these really precise ways to measure. So it'd be pretty simple, I think, to bring about some change.

And I'm sure they like it like this, I think. Yeah. It's better than – I mean, the thing is that if it just went away – I've talked about this on the show before. But, like, if the ball just suddenly got deader, then, I mean, that might be good in some ways. It might incentivize hitters to just aim for contact more so than power and that might cut down on strikeouts but like in the really short term there would just be like a total cratering in offense because people would still be swinging for the fences they'd still be missing the ball all the time but when they did

make contact it it wouldn't go over the fence so often. And so for now, at least, this is like propping things up so that even though the strikeouts keep going up, scoring doesn't fall off a cliff. But it could, at least in the short term, if they did change the ball. So yeah, it's not in your imagination that there have been a lot of homers this year. There have been a lot of homers this year. There have been. Yes, I should say that Rob was far more responsible in his speculating than I was in mine just now.

I do wonder, I will be really curious to hear what pitchers have to say about how the ball might feel different to them than it has in past years, if it does. I don't know that, we haven't said that this is like a perfectly correlated thing, but we did start to hear more about blister injuries and and that being a persistent problem at the same time that a lot of research was showing that the seams were perhaps a bit higher and i don't know that when you're throwing a baseball an increase in hip by

pitch might also indicate that the seams have changed but i'd just be curious to hear how the ball feels to guys so you know beat writers will you please go ask them that because we would like to hear their answers um but yeah it's it's a tricky balance to strike because on the one hand i think you're right like offense would just crater for a lot of guys were the ball to suddenly be thoroughly de-juiced. But it also strains some credibility when you have some of the guys who are hitting home runs hitting home runs. So I don't know which is a more concerning sort of state of affairs for baseball in terms of our ability to buy it as like an actual show of the skills that we've come to trust. I don't know.

Yeah, we did get a question from listener Chris who read Rob's article and he wants to know like if there's less drag on the baseball, if the ball's carrying better when you hit it, doesn't that also mean that it should move less or that it should affect pitchers in some way? And I mean, in one way it does in that the ball gets to home plate faster, it loses less speed. And so that is kind of contributing to higher velocity, at least at the plate, presumably. But Rob said that he doesn't think the drag would have that huge a difference on like command or movement, because it's like you're talking about the 55 feet of a pitch being in the air basically and it's less noticeable over that shorter distance than it is over the like 400 feet of a home run ball so i

think that is why it's it's kind of difficult to detect but it's possible like he says it should have some kind of effect on the actual pitch movement. So, I mean, that could be a compounding effect to some degree where not only is the ball traveling better when it's hit, but it's traveling a little faster when it's thrown. And maybe if it's moving a little bit less, although I think spin rate is probably more important. And now teams are putting all this emphasis on spin rate that might just overcome any difference in the drag of the ball. But anyway, that is happening and Rob will keep tracking it, I'm sure. And the strikeout rate right now is 23.7%, which is up 1.4% over the full season rate last year. And I think the early season smallish sample strikeout rates tend to be pretty predictive and stable. So even though we've just seen a tiny sliver of the season, it's still many thousands of plate appearances. So it's meaningful. I know I have not yet had an opportunity to listen to you and Sam talk about this, although I think that the sort of aesthetics of pitches came up on your last episode. Right. It's next to my queue.

It has not felt displeasing that there have been so many strikeouts because it feels like a lot of them have come on just real pretty pitches. Yeah, exactly. So I don't know. I'm not terribly concerned yet that this is a problem. I know that we like to fuss and worry about whether this stuff is going to make us like baseball less, but so far I'm pretty okay with it, I think. Yeah, I still like baseball. The contact stuff, we've talked about all that ad nauseum,

and I'm sure we will continue to. But yeah, there are some redeeming factors. I think it's true that everyone's sort of standing around out there more than they used to, and that that wasn't really the way that the sport was drawn up initially. But still, I mean, I think it's concerning because if this continues and it's just rising unchecked forever, then eventually it's going to be a problem. But I think they have finally realized that and they're starting to at least give some serious consideration to changing these things. So I'm a little less worried about that as an existential problem than I was before. Yeah. Have you and Sam talked about Nationals fans reactions to Bryce Harper's return? Did you talk? No, we should talk about that. Yeah.

How do you feel about that? I we should talk about that. We should talk about that. I can start by saying how I feel about that, which is that I feel so badly for fans when they lose a star like Bryce Harper. But it sure does seem silly to behave as they have. But also, we've all been disappointed. It's like being jilted in a relationship i guess if the terms of your relationship are dictated by uh you know a baseball team offering millions of dollars to someone um but it just uh

you know bryce had a good time in dc he was he was good there he never had a he never had a losing season in washington dc made the postseason a couple times. I was trying to decide when is it sort of morally upright to boo in that way and to be so surly. I don't know what the answer is. No. I mean, there are times when, like, a star from one team comes back after he's, like, traded to a different team or something and he gets booed. And it's like he to a different team or something and he gets booed and it's like he didn't demand the trade i mean i guess like if you did demand a trade if you said like i hate this city and i hate these fans and i want out like okay in that case sure but if it wasn't even

his choice to go somewhere now in harper's case it was ultimately his choice but like philly's offered him more money and i know that the nationals offered him you know what sounds like a lot of money to most people but at least that initial 10 years 300 million dollar offer it was later clarified there was like a ton of deferred money there and it wasn't anything close to actually that valuable and so phillies offered him considerably more and evidently the Nationals just kind of dragged it out and weren't all that aggressive about making higher offers. So I don't blame him for taking a higher offer. And I generally just wish that we could appreciate

what players did for their previous franchise more so than being mad at them that they're not there anymore. I mean, on the other hand, I kind of like rivalries. Yes. And I kind of like a little bit of bad blood if it doesn't rise to the level of violence. But there was a lot of juice in that stadium. Yeah. The fans were into it and excited. And Harper didn't seem demoralized about it or anything. Like it seemed like he was enjoying it, if anything, like he kind of liked being the heel in D.C.

And he was kind of playing it up a little. So maybe it's for the best ultimately, like as long as they're not like drilling him or something. I mean, if you just want to boo and it gets people into the game. Maybe that's a good thing. But if I were a Nationals fan, I think I would just be like, hey, I'm glad we got to watch this guy for a while and sad that we don't get to know. Yeah, I think that you're right. A little bit of, you know, friendly rivalry is good. And you're right to say, like, I think Bryce is fine. He didn't seem particularly fussed. I think that he, you you're right to say at times relishes the role of being a bit of a villain it was a sharp contrast though and i don't mean to say that

nats fans are bad and angels fans are good or that bryce harper is bad and mike trout is good but when i was watching the you know the rangers angels game was the the last game on last night and there was a moment when mike trout hit a a home run, which, you know, that happens a lot. But there was a coordinated set of fans with each letter of thank you, Mike Trout. And you could tell that they were just so happy that he was going to be an Angel forever. And that's a nice thing, too. So rivalries and also a deep appreciation for single franchise players. I think that we can have those things coexist in baseball and appreciate both of them and it would be just fine.

Yeah, I like it because they're within the same division and they're going to be contending, competing this year. That really raises it to a higher level. They're going to be playing each other 19 times a year. So kind of like it in that sense. I wonder if some of it has to do with the fact that he just never won a World Series, never won a playoff series even, right, in DC. And so not that that was his fault, really, but he was in some sense, like, kind of a frustrating player at times, just because, you know, he can be so great and wasn't always. And then the same was true of the team, where the team was really talented and they just never broke through. And if they don't, I mean, they're still really good without him.

Maybe they're better without him than they were with him last year. But if they don't ever break through, then I think this will go down as kind of a disappointing period for the franchise, just because it was so good and then it didn't really make much of it in the playoffs. So maybe that's part of it, just like lingering bitterness about the way that the Nationals last few seasons have ended and kind of making him the scapegoat for that. year where he, you know, his MVP season, which was this insane, you know, this insane year where he was, I think the, he was the youngest player to win a unanimous MVP vote was of course a year that they just didn't make the playoffs at all. So they, you're right. They were never quite able to line up his, his peak, really great peak years with the rest of the team. I mean, sometimes, but not always. I guess we haven't seen Patrick Corbin.

I'm checking baseball reference to make sure that my memory of this is right. So Patrick Corbin has only had the one Mets start. So we have yet to see Patrick Corbin versus Bryce Harper. I bet that'll be scintillating. I bet Nationals fans will get into that because that's where that money went. One thing I could maybe understand being a bit salty about is if his defense was so bad last year because he was kind of taking it easy before the big payday, which having watched a lot of Bryce Harper highlights and defensive plays from last year

when I was trying to figure out how he went from pretty good fielder to like one of the worst fielding seasons of all time, certainly seemed like he was not quite putting as much effort out there. And, you know, you could be hiding an injury or something for all we know, but he was not diving anymore the way that he used to. And in some ways that was good because he wasn't crashing into walls either. That was a problem for him in the past, but it looked a little from afar, at least like maybe he was up making a lot of money from someone else, then maybe that could be something that you hold against him. But I don't think that made the difference between the Nationals making the playoffs last year and not ultimately. So I wouldn't really carry that grudge personally. It's so funny because baseball players are up there with like, I guess, surgeons and like air traffic controllers and like bomb techs where you're like the expectation is 100% effort and performance all the time. Yeah.

Whereas like, you know, I like my job very much. You like your job. I think we're both pretty good at our jobs. But like we have days where you're not, you just have days where you're not feeling it, right. Or you're distracted by something or stuff's going on, you know, in your personal life. And you're thinking about that instead of thinking about, you know, editing a list or whatever. And, uh, even though I edit very carefully all of the lists, um, and people just understand that it's like part of being alive and it's okay. Cause as long as you do a good job most of the time and you don't make any really egregious errors, you can coast on a couple of days a year.

We understand that as a human reality, except if you're a baseball player in a walk year or like a surgeon, you definitely want to land all the planes right. Yeah. That seems good. Those two seem like you should get them right, but we could maybe give Bryce a little leeway that he wanted his body to be you know whole so that he could make a bunch of money we're so demanding oh i know we are one other player i wanted to to mention is ramon loriano who uh has been just exquisite this past week he is his trademark of course is throwing and uh that's how he introduced Himself to all of us last year With that really incredible throw and

This week he has Had three outfield assists in four Games against the Red Sox Most recently he threw out Mookie Betts At third base in the ninth inning On Thursday he is Just unbelievable it's like it's One of the most I don't know

Impressive single tools that any player in baseball has right now is Ramon Laureano's arm. Everyone knows this. And Betts even said, I should have known. He's pretty much thrown everybody out. And that's the only problem with this kind of run is that it can't really continue because at some point you stop running on him. And that's a shame because then he has few opportunities to throw people out. And that still has value, obviously, if you're preventing guys from running. And that is taken into account in fielding stats and war and everything. So it still would help the A's, but it wouldn't be as fun from a producing highlights

perspective. So I'm all for people continuing to test Ramon Laureano very ill-advisedly because he will throw you out every time. Not that interleague advanced scouting is worse or anything than it is when you see someone in a division, but I want to see him in an interleague game because I feel like that's where the potential for a base runner to just not be as conscious of the arm because you're not seeing a guy a lot. You're not going to play him multiple times a year. You're just going to have that one series.

I feel like that's where, I think you're right, things will quiet down. People will stop running on him. And then who do they have? They have the NL Central this year, I guess, right? Because Mariners do too. Who do they have? They have the NL Central this year, I guess, right? Because Mariners do too. So yeah, so maybe someone will do something goofy when they pays as close attention to those things and then there's also just kind of like well i read it but i gotta see it for myself or right sure he can throw out this other guy but can he throw out me there's kind of like a macho aspect to it and until you've been burned personally maybe you're still willing to

give it a shot so i'm sure he will continue to have victims on the base paths, and I'm all for it because his throws are... One of the ones that he had this week, he kind of initially misplayed it, which I think was probably why he haven't had the opportunity to throw the guy out at third. But that was a great one because I had no idea that there was a play at third. And then suddenly here comes the ball bouncing into the frame even faster than the runner. And I think he was as surprised as anyone. Which sometimes the best throw highlights come from not playing the ball particularly well. Like the Yoannis Cespedes one down the left field line.

That was one that if he had gotten to it more quickly, then that might not have shaped up that way, but ultimately was happy that it did. Yeah, I think Yo is probably, he's like the king of the not actually great throw that looks amazing. The fielding actually isn't often incredible here, but the highlights are so sublime that none of us actually care. It's like you miss playing the ball initially is why you had to use

your cannon and good grief are we glad you did yeah i wonder if he will come back and do anything this year because the mets have looked good but yeah if he were able to come back and contribute that would be big for them i don't know probably not something you can count on yeah i was just i'm trying to remember i was having this conversation with someone the other day that the mets uh you know they might be not that I will be super disappointed if this ends up being a correct prediction, but the Mets are kind of playing their way out of any sort of Tebow call up in all likelihood, at least not Mets. I feel that I should tell our listeners that in service of me actually remembering to pay attention to my fantasy baseball team and honoring the patron saint of this podcast, I picked up Astadio today for my fantasy team, and I'm very excited. It's going to be great.

He was available, huh? I get the sense. It's probably a skewed representation of the fantasy playing audience, but in our Facebook group, everyone has started a thread to say, picked up Estadio in my fantasy league. So there must be a lot of confused fantasy players out there wondering why he is never available. On the other hand, as we speak, Williams Estadio is leading the major leagues in WRC Plus, minimum 10 plate appearances. So even though he's not playing every day, when he does, he goes three for four. Yes. It was a very rough way to find out that my friends do not listen to my podcast. But I will, I guess, take it in the interest

of being able to enjoy Estadio just hanging out on my team. It's going to be great. Yeah. How big is that league that he was sitting there on the waiverware? It's a 10 team league this is i will promise to never talk about my fantasy team again because i know that it is boring to literally everyone else so that's okay um it is a league that i was convinced i had been kicked out of um unceremoniously i absolutely too knowledgeable about baseball no for for setting my lineups for like two weeks and

then never doing it again oh i see yeah no i was i would have absolutely deserved to be excised from this league i um lucked into mike trout when someone forgot to protect him as a keeper and then proceeded to do a very terrible job managing and then i learned that i had not been kicked out and had a conflict for our draft so auto drafted team, which should have gotten me kicked out again. And right now I am first in the West. And so we're just going to engage in a weird experiment to see how often I actually remember to engage with this thing. But somehow my Otto draft team acquired for me Nelson Cruz and Jamesz and james paxton and cory seeker and so it's a very odd yeah it's a very odd year for we bought a zanino that is that is the team and i will never talk about it

ever again i promise okay did you see williams astadio's instagram post on friday it's so beautiful he wrote this uh in english and spanish and it's a picture of him elegantly fielding a ball at third base, it looks like. And the text in English is, all my minor league career, I heard I was not going to be a big leaguer because I did not look like one. I was too short. I was too stocky. I did not have the physical traits customarily associated with a major league player. Well, here I am. So let that be a lesson to anyone reading this who has ever been told that their physical appearance limits their ability.

It does not. And if anyone ever comes at you with that, just knock them out of the way and stay focused on your goals and the path to get there. So Williams is now making inspirational Instagram posts in addition to everything else. Oh my gosh. So perfect.

He's so perfect. Oh, he has a chicken on his Instagram. Oh, I guess this is a rooster. Excuse me. That is delightful. This kid appears adorable. What a lovely thing. I just am so happy that baseball is a sport

that has room for Williams Estadio. What a great sport. What a nice thing. There's one other thing I wanted to talk about. We got a listener email from Jacob Nathan, who is a Patreon supporter, meant to get to this the other day, but didn't have the data in time. So he wanted to ask about Chris Sale,

who is probably someone we should banter about anyway, but he said, Chris Sale getting shelled on opening day got me wondering what is the worst single game performance by a pitcher who won the cy young award that season if sale won the cy young this year would his seven earned runs in a game be unprecedented and i got some data on this from dan hirsch of baseball reference and it turns out that no in fact chris sale could go on and win the cy Young Award this year and that would not even be close to the worst start that any Cy Young winner has ever had so the record for most runs allowed in a game either earned or unearned is 10 and that was done by Whitey Ford in 1961 and Bartol Cologne in. Both of them gave up 10 runs, although that was six earned for Ford and five earned for Bartolo. If you go by earned runs, the record is nine,

which is shared by six different pitchers. So Denny McClain in 1969, Roger Clemens in 1991, pitchers. So Denny McClain in 1969, Roger Clemens in 1991, Chris Carpenter, 2005, Dallas Keuchel, 2015, Roger Clemens, 1998, and Randy Johnson, 2001. If you go by game score, this actually makes Sale look the best because Sale's game score, according to baseball reference in that start, was 21, which is very bad, but not quite as bad. So Sale went three innings in that start. He gave up six hits, seven earned runs, two walks, four strikeouts, three homers, and a hit by pitch. Not great, but 21 game score. The record for worst game score by a Cy Young winning starter is Denny McClain's six in 1969. He pitched four and a third. He faced

26 batters. He gave up nine runs, all earned 11 hits, one homer. He walked two, he struck out three, and that was like a fairly low offense era too. I'll put this whole list online for people who would like to peruse it but there are many game scores lower than Chris Sales 21 which in a way is kind of nice just goes to show that you can be truly terrible on at least one day of the season and still at the end of the year get voted the most valuable pitcher or the best pitcher in the league so there's hope for all of us when we have a bad day so that's the answer to that question Jacob Jacob. But Chris Sale's next start was superficially successful. He pitched six innings that time. He gave up three hits, one run, two walks,

one strikeout. And that is the scary part. So Chris Sale, he now has five strikeouts and four walks in his nine innings pitched this year. And his was diminished at least in the early innings i know he was throwing like high 80s or so and that's uh not what you want to see from chris sale that's a it's a little scary not what you want especially after you just extended him for five years so yeah it's a little worrisome especially given how he ended last season too early to panic probably i'm sure some people are panicking but too early to deservedly panic probably yeah the combination is just so tricky when you're at when you're walking nine and a half percent of the batters you face and then you have like a four home run per nine it's just like you're you're leaving yourself so little margin for error.

And then if the velocity doesn't recover, you wonder what he does. I remember during that opening day broadcast, I don't remember which member of the ESPN booth said this, but they were like, oh, you know, no one panics after one start. And I wanted to be like, are you new? People are panicking during this start. This start that has not yet concluded is inspiring a great deal of panic on Twitter from every Red Sox fan I know. only pitched nine innings just because they wanted to take it easy with them because he broke down late last year and because he has a career-long record of not pitching as well at the end of the season. And they expect to be a playoff team, so you want him to be fresh.

So the idea was that they would just have him start slowly, and he only pitched nine innings. So maybe he's just like I think Alexlex was tweeting that this is like the period where in spring training if you pitch this many innings a lot of guys go through a dead arm phase and maybe that's it so his velocity is definitely down and it's down from this point last year so sort of scary but since he was handled differently in spring training it's possible that that will all come back and uh yeah we'll see it's i mean he's kind of a scary guy to commit to for five years because he did have a couple injury list appearances last year with shoulder stuff and that's always scary and people have been predicting he'd get hurt for his whole career which has been wrong up to this point. But if you keep predicting it, it usually

will be right eventually. With pitchers, certainly. Well, if we could offer any comfort to the Red Sox fans that are panicking or the Yankee fans who are panicking, all these lovely people who are panicking, we could just remind folks that the Mariners are currently baseball's winningest team. They are doing that by allowing almost five runs a game, but scoring seven. That seems unlikely to sustain itself. We could point out to them that at the moment, Tim Beckham is tied with Yelich, Harper, and Colton Wong for the most position player war. the most position player war. We could point out to them that while Jacob Dregrahm is a top fan graphs,

war leaderboard for pitchers. He is followed by Matt Boyd in second place, although Matt Boyd's been pitching pretty well and Jordan Zimmerman in fourth. So, well, I suppose he's actually tied for third with a couple of guys. So everyone could, could relax for a minute.

It's going to be fine. It's too early to say anything. And, you know, Boston fans in particular can just go watch the World Series from last year if they're feeling stressed. Yeah, it's no fun to be the person who just sings the small, simple-sized song every April because it's like we want to enjoy things and pay attention to them and talk about them.

But it's almost like you have to say it to counteract other people who are acting as if everything has a lot of extreme significance. And then you want to be on the other end of the scale and be like, nothing matters until June or something, which is not fun either. And yet it's kind of true. At least sometimes something, some things matter. Some yet it's kind of true. At least sometimes. Some things matter. Some things are worth paying attention to. Injuries are bad and scary and can affect things for longer than this. But yeah.

I mean, records to this point. You'll forget about it. Yeah. Like there are things that matter. There are things that we should be aware of. You should keep your eye on the velocity stuff. But at the moment, Tim Beckham is more valuable by war than Mike Trout. So we have not reached the point of the year where stats mean anything. Mike Trout is not above our war leaderboard.

He's not at the top. Yeah. Yeah. Trout, I think, got there really early last year, which was kind of inconvenient because that was the marker for when stats mean stuff. But if he's like the war leader after a week, then stats still don't mean stuff. It's still too early. Mike Trout and his 223 WRC points. Oh, he's so good.

Yeah. He's so good. Petriello had a stat the other day about what Trout was hitting and what the Angels were hitting as a team, even including Trout. I haven't looked to see what that is, but we can get a quick update on that because he was like the only Angel who had hit at all, which to be fair, they're missing Upton and they're missing Otani at least until the end of the month. I think Otani wants to be back by the end of April and I want him to be back by the end of the month, I think. Otani wants to be back by the end of April, and I want him to be back by the end of April. But yeah, that lineup is looking really thin right now. Yes.

Right now, the Angels as a team are hitting 186, 260, 270 with a 60 WRC plus. And Mike Trout is hitting 350 517 600 with a 223 wrc plus he's just like he just never like even has a bad week really like i remember he went through a slump at at some point like in terms of hits and he still had like a 400 on base or something during that slump with good defense he's just oh god right he's walking almost 21 of the time and he has oh no i didn't even want to work my way into a nice joke but i'm going to he has a very nice 6.9 k rate and a babbit that's pretty usual for him he's got a 333 babbit so he's just the best he is the best yeah i hope he's not having

second thoughts about that extension already just seeing the the lineup that is surrounding him right now yeah but 13 years is such a long time that you can you can see your way to any kind of future over that length of time you know you're gonna you're gonna know a bunch of totally different people in 13 years than the people you know know, now. Right. All of all of your pets will be different. administration's we could be back on the moon it's uh there's all kinds of stuff that can happen in that amount of time and i think the easiest one to imagine your way to is a really good angels team because sure why not it's not like they're the mariners all right have we talked enough we've talked like an hour already yeah we did a good job even though i botched the intro a couple of times. You should leave it all in.

All right. So I guess we'll wrap this thing up and that'll do it for this week. And we will talk again soon. Sounds good. Quick update on Mike Trout versus the rest of the Angels. Trout homered twice on Friday night on his bobblehead day. And so now the Angels as a whole are hitting 188, 257, 290. That is a 63 WRC plus. And that is including Mike Trout, who is now hitting 375-515-833. That is a 276 WRC plus. And he is actually tied for the

league lead in Fangraphs War among position players, although he is still trailing some pitchers. So Trout, along with Christian Jelic and Cody Bellinger, very close to the top. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and keep the podcast going. Ryan Gorszkowski, Dave Barron, Kyle Godown, Timothy Riker, and Matthew Scully. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild,

and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance this week. You can pre-order my book, The MVP Machine, which comes out in less than two months. And we hope you have a wonderful weekend. We will be back to talk to you very early next week. That I had my life planned out perfect Adding all the numbers correct

No missing digits No real mistakes Just human errors Make human hearts break